This research is designed to investigate the impact of the exercise of power in the family upon the adolescent's tendency to comply with expectations and directives from significant others in the adolescent's social space. This general objective will be achieved through (1) the developing and testing of theoretical propositions formulated from a synthesis of research findings and theory from the social power and child psychology literature, and (2) the collection of multiple measures of the power dimension in the family as well as multiple measures of the dependent variables taken to be specific instances of the more general dimension of compliance. Two different types of data collection (interview/ questionnaire and controlled observation) will be gathered from four members of each family (father, mother, junior high school and high school age children). The 200 families in the sample will be drawn equally from white collar and blue collar social strata. The multiple measurement of the key variables will allow for a discriminant and convergent validational analyses to be performed on the various measures of power as well as provide for multiple tests of the derived hypotheses to better assess the validity of both the measurements and the underlying theoretical formulations. The final objective will be to consult with those working with families having problems centering around the power-compliance phenomena of family interaction in an effort to make the major findings from the research usable to practitioners concerned about family problems.